Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic, 2007). $22.99, hardcover.

By Michael Moon

One day long, long ago, before there were peerless restorations on DVD of legendary director Louis Feuillade’s silent film-cycles Les Vampires and Judex, I was jonesin’ so bad to see some of his work that I called the film archive of the Library of Congress and asked if they were holding any. The sympathetic librarian told me that while they didn’t have Fantômas or any of the really good ones, they did have a fragment of a print of an early film of his entitled Gèneviève de Brabant. Did I want them to dig it out of cold storage?

I did. Avid to sample even minor Feuillade, I traveled to D.C. and presented myself at the archive, where I was set up with a projector and cautioned not to rewind the film at anything higher than projection speed lest I destroy the ancient, brittle footage in the process.

The fragment turned out to be only a few minutes long. The film’s set was a small and fake-looking castle-tower-and-moat that could have easily fit onto a conventional stage for some low-budget “Fairytale Theater” production. The actress who played the heroine wore the requisite coneshaped “medieval” headdress-with-veil. Shown in medium long-shot, she peered longingly out the window of her tower for awhile, then gazed down at her reflection in the water. She peered longingly out the window again. 

Rewinding it at projection speed meant watching it backwards as well as forwards, which I did enthralled. I soon realized that I was seeing something I had never seen before in all my years of moviegoing, which was the gorgeous quality of light in the film (and in the mise-en-scène). Only in platinum prints of a few photographers’ work in galleries and museums had I seen light at all comparable in richness and density. I found myself almost overwhelmed to see it in a moving image. I found several minutes of a costumed actress gazing out a window and looking down at some water captivating in the extreme because her face, her veil, her gown, the plaster tower, and the water all shimmered and glowed in contrasting registers of luminous intensity. I thought of the passage in Mythologies in which Roland Barthes, in “The Face of Garbo,” writes about how the actress “belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy....” I and many other queer kids of my vintage (Charles Ludlam, most notably) had first seen Garbo in Camille in butchered and filthy TV prints on The Late Show, in which, miraculously, the face and the film still worked their magic. Barthes, born in 1915, was old enough to have seen her at the Bijou in fresh prints that may have glittered and glowed the way my rag of Feuillade did. It’s not just the face and the film, I want to tell him or remind him, but also the particular qualities of light emanating from the film. But Barthes doesn’t mention that as part of the vision that he says “gives rise to mystical feelings....”

I don’t want to claim that there’s anything unique about my experience of the power of the kind of silverpoint illumination that enthralled me as I watched the old Feuillade fragment in the film archive. I value that experience not so much for its particularity, enlightening about early film as it was, but rather because it was a kind of moment I believe I had much more frequently as a child reader and filmgoer. It was simply one of my relatively rare experiences as an adult of surprised and delighted wonder as I watched a film or read a book.

I am grateful to Brian Selznick for providing me some of the same kinds and intensities of pleasures as I read his new book The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Riding the wave of increasingly widespread interest in graphic narrative fiction of a wide variety of kinds, Selznick in The Invention of Hugo Cabret has come up with a kind of metaform all his own (one soon to be much imitated, I suspect) that not only combines some of the more electrifying charms of picture books, kids’ chapter books, adult novels, and motion pictures, but also allows each of these media to build on and play off each others’ energies and capacities. 

Hugo, the titular boy-orphan hero of Selznick’s book, is living a forlorn existence at the beginning of his story. Having lost his mother years before, and his father more recently—in a museum fire (the book definitely starts in a deeply bummed, Lemony Snicket register)—Hugo has gone to live with a kindly uncle who keeps the clocks wound in a busy Paris train station. The uncle has disappeared at the beginning of the story and, with no one else to turn to, Hugo continues to live all but invisibly in the recesses of the station, secretly taking over his uncle’s job. Without a guardian or any money, the boy is forced to swipe croissants and milk from the deliveries to the station café in order to eat. He also cadges little wind-up toys from the station’s toy shop, which he pillages for parts to use in his ongoing project of repairing an automaton he has retrieved from the ruins of the museum fire. At first incurring the wrath of the toy seller, Hugo eventually gains the friendship of the man’s ward, a girl of about Hugo’s age named Isabelle, and finally of the toy seller himself. As the story unfolds, extensive and peculiar connections emerge among the boy, the automaton, the toy seller, and the early cinema (from that of the “Great Magician” Georges Méliès to the comedies of Harold Lloyd to the lyrical films of René Clair).

But I’m telling the story as if it were a mere chapter book, which in a way is completely misleading, for The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a picture book of a remarkable kind. Only about a third of its 500 pages bear print narrative. The rest feature Selznick’s beautifully paced pencil drawings, many of them organized as we turn the pages into instantly recognizable kinds of cinematic sequencing: moving in (for example) from a shot of the early morning sky to a bustling cityscape to the exterior of a train station to a crowd hurrying through its interior to a boy in that crowd rushing up a flight of stairs as he casts a glance over his shoulder. (The book culminates, as a good adventure movie should, with an extended and virtuosically rendered chase scene.) Crane shots, fades-to-black, and zooms abound, and, most of all, long and loving still shots—long, medium, close-up and super-close-up. The real syntax of the book lies in its affinities with all these innovations of early classic cinema rather than in its chaste and unobtrusive prose, as well as with the frequent and sometimes thrilling jumpcuts between pictorial and prose narrative. The book raises intriguing questions about relations among the whole panoply of narrative media that have joined “print prose” and conventionally printed text-and-illustration over the past century or so: photo sequence, comicstrip, film, comicbook, television, digital imagery, and so on. 

There is a wonderful tension in the book and in the story that it tells, primarily through visual images, between an aesthetic and an ethic of dutiful biddability and amiable responsibility—a world of clockwork reliability and predictability—and a quite different ethic/aesthetic of theft, hiding, destruction, and flight. Passage from one of these realms to another is a rare and unforeseeable occurrence, heralded by collisions and catastrophes, flashes of passing out, experiences of grievous loss, and other shocking and overstimulating incidents—as when the brakes of a train fail and it crashes right through the wall of the station, its engine plunging a story downward onto the unsuspecting sidewalk outside. (This actually happened at the Montmartre station in the early twentieth century; the celebrated photo of the hapless engine hanging out of the front of the station is reproduced on pp. 382-83 of Hugo Cabret).

As most of the book’s reviewers mention, Scholastic Press, grown rich as the U.S. publishers of Harry Potter, has placed some of its considerable resources behind the current release of Hugo Cabret. It’s hard to imagine the latter turning into anything like the mega-franchise Harry Potter is, partly because it’s hard to imagine a sequel to Hugo Cabret. For all its involvement in the ways and means of several predominantly serial media, Hugo’s story comes to what seems to be real closure; the bold “THE END” that extends across pp. 524-25 would seem to denote just that. But I know from my own experience of reading and rereading the book that all kinds of revisions of it are probably being produced by readers of many ages in many places to make its delightful method work on the narrative and media invention(s) closest to one’s own heart. It will surprise no one who’s read this far to learn that in the first one I wrote, I am (I mean the child-hero I’ve invented is) eventually recognized and adopted by Feuillade. And I’m now working on an R-rated one for “mature” readers about how a forlorn young hero that I’ve invented is eventually recognized and adopted by the great gay German director, F.W. Murnau. Murnau’s visually sublime films—Nosferatu, Sunrise, Tabu—are very different kinds of films from Méliès’s féerique marvels; they have some visual affinities with the work of Selznick’s other favorite filmmaker-model, Clair. They deserve their own “Invention”-book. But, of course, so do many other great bodies of visual production. Why should we restrict the game to filmmakers? What about the hilarious and febrile work of the early cartoonist Rodolphe Töpffer, ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev, children’s book illustrator Wanda Gág, anthropologist Ruth Benedict? Aren’t there guttergeek readers who’d like to be recognized and eventually adopted by one of these worthies? Selznick has given us the magic kit; now can we try this at home?

What is the “Invention” of Hugo Cabret? In the course of the story (plot spoiler to follow), he restores a marvelous automaton. But he doesn’t invent it. The genuine invention this book features is its thoroughly and intricately mixed mode of inviting the reader into its narrative processes and into the kinds of images and jumpcuts—from image to verbal language and back—that both suture and fracture the stories it tells. In inventing Hugo Cabret and the particular kind of visual and verbal surround that produces him for the reader, Brian Selznick has brought into the world an invention in which any child genius, no matter its age, could take lots of pride. Gifted and precocious children of all ages now have this notable new contraption to enjoy, to take apart, to reinvent…and to see whose name, when it’s properly reconstructed, it writes.